by Marc Saltzman, Special to USA TODAY

Due out on Feb. 5 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Windows PC, the "Mature"-rated game drops protagonists Isaac Clarke and John Carver on the frozen planet of Tau Volantis. Through intense third-person combat, puzzle-solving, collecting and exploration, the duo must survive long enough to uncover the source of the deadly Necromorph outbreak.

Largely due to the franchise's popularity, fans already know quite a bit about Dead Space 3 - including its ambitious co-op (cooperative) play. But to dig a little deeper we caught up with producer John Calhoun, to share five little-known facts about the making of the upcoming game.

John Carver's name wasn't always John Carver

Dead Space 3 was designed from the ground up to support drop-in, drop-out cooperative play. "But although we had a character model and fully-developed back story for the second player, we couldn't decide on the right name for him for over a year," recalls Calhoun. "So internally, we just called him 'Coop' - as in 'co-op - which eventually became 'Cooper,' and this name appears in our original script and throughout the game's data." Calhoun says Cooper's name finally got changed to Carver in the last nine months of production, but some of the team continues to call him Cooper to this day.

The Lost Flotilla has a deep backstory

The derelict ships that Clarke and Carver explore in the first act of the game aren't just the product of some artist's imagination, says Calhoun. Rather, the game's creative director wrote a 10,000-word story that dives deep into the history of the ships and their personnel. "If you see 'AH-64d' stenciled on the side of a ship, it's not just some random combination - we know that it denotes a Prototype Attack ship with advanced Search & Rescue support for the 64th division of the Sovereign Colonies Armed Forces," explains Calhoun, with a laugh.

'Dead Space' speaks in tongues

The Dead Space franchise has always had fun with language, says Calhoun. "In the first Dead Space, we had a unique Unitology alphabet that was used in-game (and in real life) to encrypt messages for fans to find - and there's a new language in Dead Space 3 that goes one step further."

"Not only do we have an alphabet for it, but we also have the language's phonemes pronounced and audibly played," he says.

In fact, being able to decipher the spoken - not just written - language is an important part of the game. "Our user-interface team researched hieroglyphics and Chinese characters to develop the written portion, and our audio team had a field day with the aural development of the language's pronunciation." Whose language is it? "You'll have to play the game to find out," teases Calhoun.

Listening to players play the game is a good idea

Dead Space 3 features voice command support for the Kinect. In fact, it's the first game ever to feature co-op specific voice commands. "While some actions were obvious from the start - such as navigating menus and sharing items with a friends - a few of the features in the final game only came about after we listened to people play the game in a 'real' setting," says Calhoun. "We found that folks tend to swear a lot when they're scared, and will sometimes spontaneously yell things at the game when they're surprised. So we built a lexicon of phrases you can use to stomp, dismember, or escape from the clutches of the Necromorphs." Unfortunately, all these phrases are unprintable, adds Calhoun.

The key to surviving? Ration Seals

"Of all the items you can craft, scavenge, and unlock in Dead Space 3, the most important to your survival is the lowly Ration Seal." These ancient scraps of paper can be found by your Scavenger Bot and are counted as a resource. Ration Seals can be redeemed for resources and exclusive MK-V Supercharged weapon parts in the Downloadable Content menu.

"The development team discovered that the secret to surviving Dead Space 3 on the Hard, Impossible, and Hardcore difficulty settings was to upgrade the Scavenger Bot completely and fully explore the world for resource caches." Accumulating plenty of Ration Seals early on will allow you to create the best arsenal possible to take down the terror.